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Emilys Blog

Food Blog Commentary

In a food blog written by Ed Bruske, subtitled "An urban insurgent engages the concerns of a hungry planet from his kitchen garden, one mile from the White House" - located here: The Slow Cook: Organic Food Miles - I read about organic vs. local, organic vs. conventional, seasonal and intuitive eating.

Organic, for a few reasons, is no longer the best we can do. "Organic" foods can include non-organic ingredients, come from thousands of miles away and sometimes leave a bigger carbon footprint than their conventional counterparts. We, as a global society, are getting farther from the source of our food every day. The blog mocks the upper-middle-class crowd who drives their SUVs to Whole Foods, and with good reason. As Ed Bruske wrote, "Can the day be too far off when we have "Energy Star" food, wherein our cantaloupes and broccoli will carry the same sort of carbon footprint labeling as our refrigerator and washing machine?" Indeed.

The article advocates a return to small, local producers or, best, growing one's own food. This course has made it clear that that is what I would love to and need to do. Vegetables and fruits have so much more life, nutrition and flavor when picked just before eating. Walking out to survey the garden before a meal, inventing new concoctions based on the ingredients before you is THE way to eat, I believe. It inspires so much more creativity - and we all know of the sadness of options - as well as providing a real sense of connection between the consumer and the food and land. When one cannot have anything that one wants and is in fact limited by the resources available, that is more like living and less like playing some awkward game of God. Working with and from the land, sharing in both its limitations and bounties, is what people have been doing all along, and in light of all the problems the world is presently experiencing, it might be the best option we have to reclaim what is rightfully ours - joy of life, for all people and all things.

Letter to the Editor (of Cosmopolitan)

To Whom It May Concern,

How are your readers doing today? Are they feeling sad, hungry, fat? What can you do to improve the collective quality of their lives?

I picked up a copy of your magazine in the bathroom the other day. I was immediately and for a full half hour sucked into some vortex which I still do not fully understand. I came out planning my day around becoming more tan, preoccupied with how to become just enough but not too much of a freak in bed, subconsciously fretting over which style of jeans was most alluring to the male mating instinct and considering which meals to supplant with an exotic bush tea so that I might once again inhabit the strangely pre-pubescent frame that I still possessed at the age of 16.

Might the women reading your magazine benefit from a reading experience that gives them less neuroses and more pleasure? Eating exactly what tastes delicious to you, slowly and in small amounts, is definitively THE way to enjoy food as well as maintain an ideal body weight. Relying on one's own tastebuds, sensibilities and hunger is the best diet, therapy and fun that can be introduced to young women today - they are starving for it, as statistics clearly indicate and I am certain that you yourself know. Younger and younger girls are engaging in the eating disorder battle, some more obviously than others, and the casualties are growing. Beyond that, many young women just don't feel good about themselves - isn't that enough to instigate change? Doesn't that fact alone demand to be recognized?

Gooey, fat-filled French cheese. It is delicious. Devote an article to that. Artisan bread, with the perfect combination of crispy yet almost chewy crust and tender springiness inside. It is a revolutionary thing, this taste and especially texture. Most of us have not even been eating bread all this time. Tell your hungry readers about that. They might listen.

Courses of food served one at a time - say, a starter, an entree, a salad, a cheese course and a dessert, with wine, of course - a meal fit for a king, a peasant, an anorexic, a glutton. They all deserve it just as much as the next person, and deserve to know about it. Food can be good, and filling your pages with any claims to the contrary is offensive.

Let them eat, let them know that they can eat, let them know that they can actually enjoy the food they eat if they study it and know about it and get into contact with it. Talk about farms, vegetables, fat, wine, cheese, ice cream, bread, full-fat yogurt, cows. Do case studies of French women. Show that there is another way. The time is now.

Sincerely, Emily Plate

Report on American Vintage: The Rise of American Wine

• note: OCR scan to be added soon; the person in the library was not available*

Thomas Jefferson decreed that Americans could make, on their own soil, wine "doubtless as good" as European wine. That has, in effect, been the holy grail pursued by American grape-growers and winemakers since the beginning. Nicholas Longworth was the father of American wine, a man who showed up in Cincinatti with a skill in many endeavors, which gained him considerable wealth, but a yearning to change the habits and attitudes of Americans towards alcohol - to grow good grapes in order to make good wine. He wanted to change the widespread drunkenness of America into a culture of refinement and temperance, much like that of Europe. Longworth knew rates of alcoholism to be lower in wine-drinking countries such as Germany, France and Italy. Americans, in general, didn't like or appreciate wine. Longworth wanted for them in the absence of safe, non-alcoholic drinks, a safe beverage to imbibe daily. Like Thomas Jefferson, he believed wine to be an agricultural product. Many people of his time believed that the alcohol in wine was slower-acting and somehow gentler than the alcohol in liquor or beer. This view waned among the temperance movement, which swung steadily from moderation towards abstinence.

Longworth, after much experimentation which yielded mediocre results, had great success with sparkling Catawba, a drink much like champagne. However, after a few years of success, a seemingly incurable vine disease wiped out American winemaking in the 1860s, with Longworth's winery sold in 1870.

During this time, and during most times, really, everyone tried growing grapes - everyone, everywhere. American grapes were considered too foxy, musky, “like the smell of a fox.” European grapes couldn't grow in U.S. – they simply kept dying. Solutions came in phases, first with hybridization of American and European grapes, then through grafting vinifera onto American varieties, a discovery made possible by the spread of the phylloxera to Europe. This American pest wiped out Europe's vines, but Charles Riley from Missouri organized the rescue via transportation of American rootstock to Europe, to which Vinifera varieties were then grafted. Flavor was not altered, as Europeans had feared, and so it was realized that this could work in America, too.

With the availability of fungicides through the advancement of technology, remarkably good wines became available locally, as they had been in Cincinatti: good, good wine, as good as that from Europe

Dr. Welch, of later Welch's Grape Juice fame, was an ardent prohibitionist who only began growing grapes because he was offended by the drinking of wine during communion. In 1869 he introduced a totally new drink unfermented, non-alcoholic grape juice. By around 1900, grape juice and the fruit itself, not wine, were the most common method of grape consumption.

Californian wine became cheaply available in East (rail). This wine was made wholly from vinifera grapes, the same as those from Europe, and so European immigrants preferred it to wine made from hybrid grape varieties in the East.

Growing urbanization and industrialization combined to make wine more likely to appear on a city table than one on the farm, and Jefferson's Longworth's agrarian ideal grew ever distant. The Anti-Saloon League gained momentum, claiming “King Alcohol,” all alcohol, a threat to American ideals and rural America. This is ironic, for Jefferson and Longworth had been striving for temperance, not abstinence, for the very same reasons of civilization.

Californian wine was becoming big business in the 1880s. Until then, production had been mostly local. Transcontinental rail shipping combined with the expanding immigrant market in the east changed everything. The CWA, or California Wine Association, was formed, effectively taking wine production from small, mostly individual agricultural enterprises to the field of industry, from local to national and even international.

Just as winemaking success became more achievable, Prohibition arrived, lasting from 1920 through 1933. Prohibition was an attempt to regulate private life through public action. Interestingly, per capita wine consumption actually increased during this thirteen-year period because people were drinking wine made at home. Wine was once again booze, swill, a drink to get drunk on that was under the control of mobsters. Various strange products were sold, such as “winebricks” that one could use to make “grape juice” and in fact most used to make wine. American wine had become like rum, from a beverage of temperance to drink of excess

With 1933 came the end of prohibition. The era had decimated American winemaking. As the author says, "American wine had not just become booze. It had become cheap, bad booze." At this time, the government at all levels regarded wine with distrust, just another agent of drunkenness. All former wineries were in great disrepair, and many were bought by distillers who promptly began to manufacture cheap, fortified wine, possibly the worst wine ever produced in the nation.

The first "wine families" of the U.S. were the Mondavis and the Gallos, families with startingly similar beginnings whose paths diverged so that they came to represent near-opposite extremes of winemaking.

In Paris in 1976, an English wine shop owner had been noticing that some wines coming out of Northern California were remarkably good. Recognizing an opportunity to make headlines, he organized a blind tasting of twelve Northern Californian wines and eight French wines. The judges knew only that some wines were French and some were American. The highest-rated wines were American. One French judge claimed that one wine bespoke "the magnificence of France." It was a Napa Valley Cabernet. This event marked the beginning of American wine's recognition as being "doubtless as good" as the other wines of the world.

Iowa City Trip Commentary